


Vestal

by witchoil



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Celibacy, Character Study, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Visions, Masturbation, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-29
Updated: 2017-11-29
Packaged: 2019-02-08 08:25:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12860646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchoil/pseuds/witchoil
Summary: Here is a promise he makes to himself.





	Vestal

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by steph princesse-de-la-rue's comments on an ask meme on tumblr, re: Kylo Ren. Namely that he is "ascetic, virginal, ferocious in battle, and terrifyingly devoted to a higher cause." 
> 
> This began as an excuse to write about purity as an aspect of his character and the feminine qualities of his pain and self-discipline and ended up being...something else, I think. It's not my usual porn-y fare, though, be aware! 
> 
> Please check out [the accompanying playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/1215030018/playlist/2fSlUvVh75TWyfaqZtHmyV) because I write everything to music.

Here is a promise he has made to himself: he will die fighting.

Since Kylo Ren was small -- a simpering thing within himself, just a wound within a child, a floating body of uncertainty, pain, and knotted muscle -- he has wanted this.

He wanted it the first time he saw his uncle’s missing hand held aloft in sunlight.

“Does it hurt?” The boy asked.

“No,” said his uncle, “it doesn’t feel like anything.”

Ben Organa cried when Luke said that, fat tears of fear and sadness.

With his knights, Kylo Ren trains to kill. He bests them one by one for the pleasure of his master. His body grinds against itself, joints burning in their sockets on the upswing and the downswing. He throws one and feels his shoulder dislocate. A slipping sensation, then a popping sound.

_Does it hurt?_

It feels like someone clapping from across an atrium. Distant. Echoing.

It feels like a blaster bolt to the gut.

\--

Here is another promise: he will have nothing.

He has nearly succeeded on this front.

He no longer has a name not made from whole-cloth.

Nor does he have a home, merely a rotating series of cells in which he dispassionately cares for the most basic needs of his body. They are an endless string of pockmarked duracrete holes where he will feed, wash, and fitfully sleep. Nothing more.

He has no possessions which are not his master’s first. A cruel lesson, which he learned early under his tutelage.

“That’s my grandfather’s mask!” The half-boy cried. “It belongs to _me_!”

“And _you_ belong to _me_ ,” said the creature enthroned before him. “And you will have it when you’ve earned it.”

He does not have a father, either. He has seen to that.

But, no matter how he tries, he cannot shake his body. He cannot rid himself of how it is his mother’s eyes looking out from his face, or how his father’s ears sprout from his head.

And so he cannot surrender his last, worst possessions.

\--

And another: he will believe in what his master teaches him.

No, that is too much. Try again.

He will believe in his master.

No. Again.

He will believe.

Here, see him breathing, trying for that much. The room is dark and empty of warmth. He is alone, has always been alone. Since before he met the air, even within his mother’s body.

Hear the quiet, forced evenness of his breath through chapped lips.

He will believe.

But no.

He drags himself from his cot in the morning and meditates for an hour. He trains. He fights. He does what little he must to keep himself alive. And he tries.

 _Force_ , he tries.

But this is not a promise Kylo Ren can make.

\--

Last: he will be untouched.

Kylo Ren has heard of Sith warriors of the past who have taken this path. And, of course, he has heard that the Jedi were meant to, though he knows with a venomous certainty that many lacked the conviction.

Since he has come into adulthood, he has upheld this promise despite his other routine failures. In many ways, it should be surprising how easy it has been, except that he seldom thinks of it. The pain of a saber wound carving a canyon across his face is difficult to ignore. The battering windstorms of exhaustion and overexertion. The sucking emptiness of his mind after his master has laid waste to it in an effort to _teach you a lesson for once in your worthless life._

These are sensations Kylo Ren is still working to master himself over.

But a desire for pleasure? The soft, susurrating needle-heat of sex?

These have become strangers to him in the past six years. He is not sure he could recognize them if he tried.

\--

When he dreams, it is the same dream again and again. He is naked and wet with blood, emerging from an ocean of it into the antechamber or the battlefield.

He walks over the polished floor of his master’s throne room and approaches the dais as he has done a thousand times. The blood covers him entirely, leaving him as polished as the floor. He is a glittering jewel, topping his master’s crown. He is useless, but not worthless. He might even be beautiful.

He walks over the earth of Endor, feeling for the first time in years the ground beneath a bare foot. He does not stumble, but leaves behind him a trail of slick red liquid that kills everything it touches. Everything but him.

Always, he is alone.

Except when he is not.

He emerges onto Takodana, and all is frozen and calm. He barely recognizes it without the cacophony of battle. It is hushed, almost silent.

Except that it is not quite.

There, down in the trees, goes a quick-footed animal. A flash of sand-brown disappearing into the lushness of the forest. A gasping breath.

_Oh._

Kylo Ren awakens, realizing something has gone horribly wrong. He is not alone within himself anymore.

\--

In the following months, she grows even louder and stronger in his mind. She appears in his dreams, also red and glistening, and he has appeared in hers, marooned on the windswept crags of an island he does not know.

Even awake, he feels her breathing, sometimes, when she meditates. One night, he feels a spark chase down his spine. He recognizes it, but can barely remember from where. The next night it is stronger and more familiar. She is somewhere, pulled taut as a bow, and he can feel the tightness. He can feel the bead of sweat tracing itself along the curve of her bent leg. He can feel the _pressure_ \--

It is enough to make him gasp for air.

A stranger emerges from the darkness and, fool, he has not forgotten after all.

\--

He is asleep but she is waking and it’s hazy, like flying a ship low through a cloud, but he can tell what’s happening here. Her hand moves in the cramped space between her body and her clothes. She breathes in and out rapidly, as though she is running away from something. Or perhaps it is towards.

A piercing sweetness fills her body, and his by extension. She swirls her fingers and something in her jerks, contracts unconsciously. Her hips roll. She chokes back air and noise and moves her fingers again. She’s so _close_ , so so so fucking close, come on, come on, fuck, yes, _stars_ yes fuck, she’s--

Kylo Ren jolts awake, thrown back into his own body to find it sticky with sweat and tense like he’s just taken a beating.

And-- Shit. He’s hard like he hasn’t been in _years_.

His eyes roll back into his head and he twists the sheets in both hands, arms spread to the sides, chest and shoulders opening as he _holds_ them open. He pins himself there with the force of his own will and blind terror.

He doesn’t touch himself, holding his hands back in anxious fear as if from a wound.

But Kylo Ren has had wounds before and never been afraid to touch them. He has beaten cuts and gashes and split open sutures. He does not fear the pain, nor the damage.

\--

In time, the haze begins to clear and Kylo Ren loses sleep for it.

He knows this is a test and that he has the choice to either pass or fail it, but the longer it goes on the harder that line becomes to find.

He knows her body now as well as he knows his own. When they are both sleeping, it is as if they become one person, even as they trace at one another’s edges in their dreams.

But when he sleeps and she touches herself, he is subsumed by her, integrated into her.

Kylo Ren does not watch Rey’s hand disappear beneath the hem of her tunic, but they guide their hand together to gently cup a breast. They soothe the ache of hiking from their thigh with firm presses of their thumbs. They lie on their back and draw their knees up and just apart enough to slip one hand between. They cup their sex like water and part it like water, too.

They press a thumb into the wet heat of their cunt for the first time. The vulnerability of it punches the air from their lungs. The fluttering tenderness, the heat-- It is not a wound, but touching it feels like touching a wound.

They are talking to their body. They are listening to it.

And every time he wakes from it, Kylo Ren is hard and desperate.

He doesn’t touch himself, no matter how badly he may want to. But that’s the problem: he _wants_ to.

And every time he cries like an abandoned child.

The problem is not that she is whole and he is not. They are similar, she and him.

He sees himself in her. In her rage and her abandonment, in her ferocity and her limitless capacity to bear disappointment.

But he also sees himself in the hair curling at the nape of her neck. The curving slope of her jaw. The high, feminine arch of her brows. The hollow of her cheek.

He has those, too, he thinks.

Those, and an aching hole, made manifest in her body that is his body too, some nights. Most nights, now.

The problem is not that he wants her, although he does.

The problem is how she makes him want himself, too.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, many thanks for reading and kudos'ing/commenting. <3


End file.
